Face-to-Face Meeting 2006-06-12/13

The 4th face-to-face meeting of the Network was held at ESO Headquarters Garching, Germany, June 12-13, 2006. The minutes of the meeting are give below.

Participants: KlausBanse, NicolaCaon, BiancaGarilli, PrebenGrosbol, PeterLinde, DanielPonz, KlausReinsch, ChristianSurace, MarkoUllgren, DougTody, MartinVogelaar, HansTerlouw, JohnCunniffe (partly)

Monday, June 12, 2006 (Chair: PrebenGrosbol)

14:00-14:15 Welcome

• PG welcomed the participants and went through the agenda which was adopted without major changes.

11:40-13:00 Requirements I: Installation and running

• A total of 195 comments on the High-level Requirements Document v0.85 were submitted by 10 people in the Network. The requirements 1-69 were discussed during the morning session.
• HT mentioned that software patents could be a problem. PG promised to raise the issue at the Comm. 5 meeting at IAU GA 2006 (see action).

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-16:00 Requirement II+III: Scripting and execution and Data access

• The remaining comments were considered during the afternoon session. Replies to the comments were added.
• HT mentioned the importance of fully including physical units referring the the experience from Gipsy (see action).

16:00-16:30 Coffee break

16:30-17:00 Individual priorities and public review procedure

• The individual priorities were discussed together with the comments. There were some arguments on whether or not to increase the priority for an MS-windows implementation. It was decided not to change the priority on this as Unix/POSIX compliant environments are available for MS-windows.
• Some comment argued for a more clean separation between requirements on environment and application. This was accepted, where possible, and a new applications section will be introduced.
• As some of the people, who submitted comments, were unable to participate in this face-to-face meeting, it was decided to have a final round of comments when the revised version 0.90 of the Requirements Documents were ready. A phone review meeting would be scheduled before a final version would be made.
• It was further decided that we should aim for a wide Internet review of the requirements to ensure the widest possible agreement on the top-level requirements. This would also increase the visibility of them. It should be mentions at ADASS 2006 at the BoF.

17:00-17:30 Needs for documentation and software delivery standards

• There were a general discussion on the needs for standards in the areas of documentation introduced by DP who would look into the matter (see action). Standards for delivery of software and patches are also important. The Linux community has developed several and we should adopt one of them.

17:40-18:00 Needs for test/validation guidelines

• It was recognized that one also should provide such guidelines. Although important, this would probably first be detailed by an actual implementation project.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006 (Chair: PrebenGrosbol)

09:00-09:10 General information

• PG gave a short update of the agenda.

09:10-10:20 OpenRTE framework (DougTody for Ralph Castain, Los Alamos)

• DT make a presentation on OpenRTE. JC add some comments on work made in Ireland in relation to OpenRTE.

10:20-11:00 Subsystem structure and interfaces (DougTody)

• DT gave a summary on Subsystem Structure and Interfaces.

11:00-11:30 Coffee break

11:30-12:00 Marseille-Milan prototype (BiancaGarilli)

• BG reviewed the plans by the Marseille-Milan group to develop a prototype based on D-Bus. They intend to use Python as a scripting language and execute VIMOS reduction tasks through a D-Bus based execution framework. Although D-Bus does provide full distribution of tasks on different nodes, it is very efficient, well documented, and interesting especially as multi-core system become more common.

12:00-12:30 SAMPO work (MarkoUllgren)

• MU summarized the current SAMPO work. It concentrate on work-flows using a Java work-flow engine. At this moment, it executes ESO pipeline tasks directly and not through an execution framework.

12:30-13:00 Further plans for proto-types

• DT mentioned that he was interesting in starting a prototype based on OpenRTE. Due to other obligations, work would first start in early 2007.

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-14:30 Parameter model and environment levels

• There was a short discussion on the parameter model. HT referred to Gipsy which has several special feature in its model (see action). This include units and references to symbolic expression.

14:30-15:00 Interface definitions - what is needed?

• The next major step on our Network program is interface specifications. It was agreed that we should base such specifications on prototypes. Further, we should check lessons learned by legacy systems.

15:00-15:20 Global time-line and possible FP7 application

• Our Network is foreseen to terminate by hte end of 2007 with a general report. We may have the option to extend this deadline into 2008.
• It would be natural to propose an implementation project for the environment to OPTICON for a possible inclusion in their EU FP7 proposal. PG will indicate this to OPTICON for their meeting end June 2006. It is expected that such a proposal would have to be submitted to EU by end 2007 or early 2008. If this is the case, we should prepare our part no later that the summer of 2007.

15:20-15:40 Planning for next 6-9 months

• We should make presentations or posters at IAU GA in Prague and ADASS in Tucson.
• A wide Internet review of the high-level requirements should be initiated.
• Prototype with D-Bus and openRTE should be started. Some explicit Use Case would be useful.
• A first draft of the interface specifications should be ready in the spring of 2007.

15:40-16:00 Summary and conclusions

• The actions were summarized (see below).

Please correct my errors and add what got lost!

-- PrebenGrosbol - 21 Dec 2006

Assigned to	Due date	Description	State	Notify
PrebenGrosbol	Sun, 30 Jul 2006	Contact IAU Comm.5 on patents and OPTICON work	closed		edit
PrebenGrosbol	Sun, 30 Jul 2006	Check and distribute toll-free phone numbers for meetings	closed		edit
DanielPonz	Wed, 31 Jan 2007	Propose standards for documentation	closed		edit
HansTerlouw	Wed, 31 Jan 2007	Summarize usage of physical units in Gipsy	closed		edit
HansTerlouw	Wed, 31 Jan 2007	Summarize parameter model in Gipsy	closed		edit
PrebenGrosbol	Wed, 30 Aug 2006	Create TWiki page on name for an open umbrella organization	closed		edit
PrebenGrosbol	Tue, 1 Aug 2006	Final revision of requirements after internal review	closed		edit

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